Helping Guru Game find a new way to monetize its audience

About Guru Game

Guru Game is a pioneering mobile game developer creating engaging and addictive gaming experiences. By combining expertise in product development, design, game creation, and marketing, the company has successfully delivered popular game titles like Jigsaw Puzzles, Sudoku Puzzle, and Find Differences.

Challenge: Finding the right monetization approach that can help Guru Game scale its revenue

To increase its average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), Guru Game sought to diversify its revenue streams. The challenge was that its core gaming audience, primarily an older demographic, rarely pays for game subscriptions or makes in-app purchases. As a result, the company relies heavily on in-app advertising for revenue.

"We wanted to expand revenue distribution and increase competition for our inventory," said Hao Li, Head of Monetization at Guru Game. "Finding a competitive partner was important for us to meet our revenue goals, as well as provide us greater revenue security."  

Guru Game began exploring ad network options and initiated discussions with Moloco about its in-app bidding SDK. Moloco had already proven to be a valuable partner, delivering high fill rates and strong eCPMs with its waterfall SDK. When AppLovin officially certified Moloco as their in-app bidding partner, Guru Game moved forward and tested Moloco's in-app bidding SDK.

Solution: Using Moloco SDK to expand competition and increase Guru Game’s eCPM

Like any savvy game developer, Guru Game assessed the impact of Moloco's in-app SDKs next to its waterfall performance. After a seamless integration, Guru Game quickly began seeing positive traction with the in-app SDK. 

"Within a month, we saw a significant boost in ARPDAU, increasing up to 5%, which greatly enhanced our overall monetization," said Hao. "The in-app SDK was also saving us valuable time and resources because we could trust Moloco's direct demand. After integrating the app, we had zero significant crashes."

With the Moloco in-app SDK built on top of Moloco's machine learning and global network, Guru Game could efficiently reach its inventory across a broader pool of advertisers. This extended reach of high-quality advertisers generated higher bid density and, in turn, increased Guru Game’s ARPDAU. The tests convinced Guru Game that it had found the right partner to diversify its revenue streams, and the company transitioned 100% of its apps to use the Moloco in-app SDK.

Results: Delivering 5% increase in ARPDAU 

Partnership with Moloco delivered significant improvement to Guru Game’s ARPDAU: 

• 5% increase in ARPDAU
• Top 5 in-app bidding ad network in terms of ad revenue
• Transitioned all of their app portfolio to Moloco in-app bidding SDK

"We were seeing good performance similar to our experience with Moloco’s waterfall SDK, but were spending a fraction of the time managing the optimization," said Hao. With the waterfall SDK, Guru Game needed to regularly manage and optimize the value of a hundred listings. The inefficiencies came at the cost of bandwidth resources and mindshare—as the team regularly worried if everything was functioning correctly.

Across all of Guru Game’s revenue streams, including waterfall and in-app bidding, Moloco in-app SDK is a top 10 demand source and a top 5 amongst just in-app bidding networks. With Moloco's in-app SDK, Guru Game has found a trusted monetization platform that can be trusted to deliver competitive ARPDAU across their entire app portfolio.